Mapping additivity through translation: From French aussi to Italian anche and back in the Europarl-direct corpus

Many languages have an overabundant set of additive focus particles, whose differences are mostly investigated in semantic (e.g. scalarity) or syntactic (scope phenomena and restrictions for specific domains of application) terms. The present study adopts a discourse perspective on the issue, comparing two cross-linguistic, near-equivalent AFAs (Italian anche and French aussi) in original texts and their translations in the Europarl corpus. Specifically, this study describes the relation established between the constituent in the scope of the AFAs and its alternatives, which can be either co-textually available or contextually inferable. Comparing the frequencies of anche and aussi in original texts and taking into account their translation equivalents confirms important differences between these adverbs. While aussi is more restricted to the syntagmatic function of linking co-textually available alternatives in adjacent sentences, anche appears in a wider array of uses, including cases in which the identification of alternatives requires more complex inferential steps, as they are distant or even implicit to the domain of application.